2026 saw the rise of something I say was long overdue: a serious challenge to mainstream Hollywood (and in the summertime, no less) by a pair of YouTuber helmed low budget horror movies. OBSESSION, written and directed by the popular YouTube content maker Curry Barker, was released in mid-May, and proved popular enough that it overtook THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU at the box office. It was followed two weeks later by the equally popular BACKROOMS from Kane Parsons, a.k.a. YouTube personality Kane Pixels.
In the case of OBSESSION, budgeted at $750 thousand and purchased by Focus Features for $15 million, it goes against the grain of 2020s Hollywood in most every respect. The film, for starters, was crafted with great care from a screenplay that’s clever and original, and bears a genuine non-ironic sense of humor. More startlingly, it pivots on male anxiety (an issue modern-day Hollywood tends to ignore), and does so without mockery or dismissal.
It centers on “Bear” Bailey (Michael Johnston), a modest college-aged fellow who’s none-too-secretly besotted with Nikki (Inde Navarrette), a young woman who works alongside Bear at a music store. After a night out with Nikki ends badly, Bear unwraps a cheap “One Wish Willow” stick he bought for her—which promises to grant its bearer’s most cherished desire when snapped in two—and breaks it with the wish that Nikki love him more than anyone else. A silly premise, admittedly, but one that in traditional horror movie terms (which posit that the dead can rise and people gain immortality through drinking blood) works well enough.
Nikki immediately begins acting weird, asking to sleep at Bear’s house because, she claims, her father has cancer. For the next few days, she insists on sticking by him, and freaks out whenever he threatens to leave her side; yet she has odd moments of lucidity, as when she abruptly pushes Bear away when he tries to kiss her. She also makes a creepy shrine for Bear’s recently deceased cat, and places its remains in a sandwich she makes him. He chooses to downplay such issues and keep the party going, despite the fact that Nikki’s behavior only grows increasingly dangerous and unpredictable—and that, as Bear learns, she lied about her father having cancer.
A call to the One Wish Willow helpline reveals that the only way to stop the madness is for Bear to die. Death does indeed occur as jealousy and psychosis overtake the One Wish Willow-ized Nikki, and it becomes increasingly clear that only one of these two characters will survive this relationship.
The film is visualized in a resolutely spare and confident manner (albeit with an excess of headroom, i.e. the space between the top of a person’s head and the edge of the frame, which in nearly every shot is quite substantial). Curry Barker has admitted to deliberately avoiding insert shots, relating his narrative in highly concentrated, and often claustrophobic, compositions.
The film’s true spark, however, is an element that most independent filmmakers tend to downplay, if not ignore entirely: sound. OBSESSION’s sound design was utilized with painstaking skill, from the expressively modulated silence that suffuses much of the film to the noisy music cues that accompany the frequent jump scares, in a dark symphony that rises to a fever pitch of gory delirium that’s as hilarious as it is shocking.
Performance-wise, Inde Navarrette (who’s become a sensation due to her work in OBSESSION) excels as both an unattainable dream girl and girlfriend from Hell a la Glenn Close in FATAL ATTRACTION and Beatrice Dalle in BETTY BLUE, while as the hapless Bear Michael Johnston is nearly as strong. The same can be said of the supporting cast (which includes semi-famous names like longtime Conan O’Brien cohort Andy Richter and THE HATE U GIVE’s Megan Lawless) of a film that aptly proves the truism that if an industry doesn’t give its consumers what they want somebody will step in to fill the gap. In this case we can consider that gap duly filled.
Vital Statistics
OBSESSION
Capstone Pictures/Blumhouse Productions/Focus Features
Director/Screenplay/Editing: Curry Barker
Producers: James Harris, Haley Nicole Johnson, Christian Mercuri
Cinematography: Taylor Clemons
Cast: Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless, Andy Richter, Haley Fitzgerald, Darin Toonder, Anthony Pavone, Justice, Anthony Casablanca, Chloe Breen, Malcolm Kelner